Free your mind and you can free the world, one illegal worker at a time

Boy, do I hate this topic. For two decades I have wanted to swim to a beach of Ao Tea Roa, sneak upland, and become an illegal sheep milker. Since Ao Tea Roa, or New Zealand as the Queen would rather call it, is about 7,000 miles across the Pacific, since I can barely tread water and don't know how to float, and since I know almost nothing about sheep, my dream is a remote fantasy on every level, and it pains me to think about this.

We're sucked into this topic this week by the suction of the Supreme Court's ruling upholding Arizona's law to punish businesses that hire illegal immigrants. But I'm not going to say one word about that decision because it's a distraction from the real issue.

My view is this: If you don't want wetbacks in this country, build a bridge over the Rio Grande, so they can walk across and stay dry.

My view is, worldwide free trade can't be stopped. Therefore it has to be mitigated. You mitigate it by allowing worldwide free exchange of populations and workers. If free enterprise is to be truly free, not only should companies be free to select where they want to locate factories, but workers need to be free to decide where they will locate and therefore who they'll work for and under what sorts of laws. Then governments and corporations would have to compete for workers.

My smart, progressive friends tell me that these are just the sorts of views you'd expect from a would-be New Zealand sheep milker. They stopped being surprised ever since I came out in favor of free government guns for the poor. They tell me these ideas are impractical.

But the United States has built into it the very idea I'm talking about. Before there was free trade within the United States, before corporations were even people, there was internal freedom of movement for workers. Oh, sure, there was some resistance. People objected to those whose idea of freely moving was to move by rail free of rail fares. Freedom of relocation was mainly just for white people. But that's the way all freedoms worked in those days.

The point is this: It works for white people, so why don't we try it with people of the other colors? It seems to be working passingly well in the European Union, too, and they don't all speak English, so why not try it with Spanish speakers?

The reason, I know, is because you can't argue with nationalism. And that's why I hate this topic. I hate what I can't argue with.

Nations are giant exclusive clubs. Before the Civil War even Abraham Lincoln contemplated a pure white America, one left behind after all the Native Americans were safely tucked away on reservations, and all the slaves he hoped to free would be shipped back to Africa. In 1857 the Supreme Court decided that imported African slaves and their descendants, even their freed descendants, could never claim citizenship, so this makes them illegal immigrants. It looked like the end of slavery would lead to that pure white America.

Then, sometime during the Civil War, Lincoln had some sort of brain enema, whereupon he figured out that shipping all the non-whites out would be a major headache. So he set in motion a long process by which blacks were eventually to be admitted to the United Exclusive Club of America.

That was considered very liberal of Lincoln at the time, and my progressive friends like his idea, but I'm considered some kind of fanatic anarchist for suggesting we handle today's so-called illegal immigration problem the same way.

Here's what's wrong with free enterprise: You have to start the freedom from the ground up. Free the people first, and then you can free the companies. Then you can free the nations. Then you'll have freed the world.